By KEVIN WALKER
Michigan Correspondent
 
LANSING, Mich. — The state’s migrant housing inspection program has been salvaged for the current fiscal year.

Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s executive order last May cut $150,000 from the program for the remainder of the fiscal year (FY). The program included seven inspectors who performed 1,000 inspections a year at more than 800 sites. As of July 1, three of the inspector positions had been cut.

The order points out although there is a peak period for inspections, many migrant housing facilities are open all year and the inspection program is in operation 12 months out of the year, also.

“We lost about a quarter of our budget, with 32 percent of the year remaining,“ said Mark Swartz, the resource conservation section manager for the environmental stewardship division of the Michigan Department of Agriculture (MDA).

Swartz is serving as interim manager of the migrant housing inspection program. The regular manager, Art Hulkoff, retired last month. Swartz said the program had pretty much lost the remainder of its budget for the year.

According to the executive order, “funding reductions will result in approximately 40-50 percent of facilities not being inspected.” Swartz said because of some money transfers within the department the program is now back on track to perform all of its required inspections, although the reprieve is for this FY only, which ends in September.

“We’ve got the wheels back on the bus for the next couple of months,” he said.

Swartz explained the MDA was able to muster enough funds to keep the program going with five inspectors, and that it is also working with the state’s Department of Labor and Economic Growth to administer the program at the same level as before the cut. The program is responsible for inspections at 4,000 living units, which have a capacity to house 22,000 migrant laborers and their family members.

The state program is separate from the federal inspection program. Normally the state doesn’t issue citations against farmers. The program operates as a licensing program and it helps reassure owners of migrant housing that they are within the law.

If the housing is damaged after it has been licensed, the state assumes the farmer has done due diligence and isn’t responsible, Swartz said. The U.S. Department of Labor also inspects housing on a random basis, however, and does issue citations. The state program decreases the chances that a site inspected by the federal government will be cited.

Swartz said the department received many calls from farmers after the executive order was issued, concerned about what they could do to decrease their risk in the event their housing wasn’t going to be inspected by the state.

“There were rumors that the department was going to issue licenses based on self-certification. That isn’t true,” he said. “It’s been real busy; we’ve been working real hard to do as much as we can this year.”

Thomas Thornburg, an attorney with Farmworker Legal Services in Bangor, Mich., has no problem with the inspection program, except that it’s understaffed. “For several years now we’ve recommended that the program be fully staffed to at least the 2002 levels,” he said.

He added that means seven inspectors, plus supervisors. Right now the only inspections going on are pre-season, which are the ones used to license the housing sites. He said there used to be in-season inspections, too.

“It’s really hard for them to know if all the systems work (during preseason),” he said.

According to Thornburg, Michigan has one of the largest populations of migratory workers, while surrounding states have proportionally more migrant housing inspectors. He stated Wisconsin has five inspectors, with only 1/10th the number of migrant housing sites.

“Now there’s 42 different hand-harvested crops in Michigan,” Thornburg said, adding that at one time there probably weren’t enough local people to do the jobs.